The days stretch out sweet-sour,
like 13-year-old boys crushing summer grass
against the sleep in their thighs,
arms flung out in a moment
when the awkwardness is not upon them.
The summer not yet knit up into autumn,
its ravelings graceful and loose.
The magnolia peelings fall easily:
after the furred pods,
a sift of corpse-white petals.
I sit in the warm lap of summer,
dreaming without rain of tepid oceans,
the twisting up of seaweed
toward the blurry surface.
I think in this flat land
of children on hills,
suspended in soft-legged running.
I follow them over a rise
to where they tumble, tangled and slow,
breaking unshattered upon billows,
disappearing behind their own dreams.
The trees stand slack,
mute through moss,
leaves heavy-hanging with color.
The angular fig,
bursting at the elbows,
squats over its fruit.
The wasp ticks toward the hard knots
of impending sweetness,
touched and caught between
slow-sweeping palms of breeze,
struck honey-dumb
between the metronome and the sea.
Ruth George Poetry Prize, 1969